Eric Hughes asks:
What are NASI/NCSI? Does it cost to use them? Is source available?
It's an API originally developed by Network Products Corporation and based on an earlier spec from Ungerman-Bass. NPC used it in building an async comm server for LANs. NPC called the API "Network Communications Server Interface" or NCSI. Novell licensed the technology from NPC and renamed the API to "Novell Asynchronous Server Interface" or NASI. Other async server vendors picked up on it about then as a result of Novell's evangelism. Serial communications software packages from Crosstalk to Procomm to tiny niche products started to support it. Then because of the end user package support, the standard was used for different kinds of serial connections. For example, we (CyberCorp) built a NASI/NCSI interface for intelligent Digiboards a while back. I've never heard of anyone being charged to use the spec for whatever they like. At least part of the spec, the part promoted by Ungerman-Bass, seems to be in the public domain. We originally got the spec from Novell when we built a Netware compatible async server. I don't know of any free source code, but code for either end of the spec is only one or two thousand lines of C. Doug